Wellth Creators

In our exploration to find new ways to create and value health we came across a number of fascinating projects. We shared them here in the hope that they'll not only inspire creativity but also help us to see health beyond the eyes of health care.

What we looked for:

People, not clinicians, defining what they want

Creative ways to leverage community

Value being defined outside of the bio-medical model

Using the postal system to stay healthy

In Jersey, postal workers are checking in on the island's elderly and infirm population. Their aim is not only to ensure people are well - reducing the likelihood of emergency admissions - but also to reconnect them with the local community. This project also defines new uses for their postal infrastructure, which is seeing reduced demand. Learn more about the project in this post.

Influencing your three best friends to influence you

In Harlem, NY, City Health Works is embracing insights from social network analysis to look at how a patient's three best friends can be influenced to create healthier habits in the patient. It's a fascinating new twist on the increasingly common health-coaching model that is beginning to improve care for patients with complex needs. Learn more about them in this post.

Talking pets help to recreate the family unit

GeriJoy uses digital avatars to give seniors companionship. The avatars are operated by GeriJoy's staff who are provided 'conversation starters' by the senior's family. The family are often living elsewhere and time-poor, so the GeriJoy system enables them to engage their senior relative in an 'asynchronous' but personal way. Not only does this provide companionship for the senior, it also gives family members peace of mind. Learn more about GeriJoy in this post.

Creating social mobility by learning from poor people

This one is about poverty but the link between poverty and poor health is well established. Family Independence Initiative gathers families wanting to change their circumstances, asks them what they’d do, encourages them to do it, and then shares their stories with the other families. By sharing what worked and what didn’t work, the families learn from each other rather than being told what to do by a central organisation. The Initiative describes itself as being in the information-sharing business, enabling families to learn from people they can identify with.

Hospitals creating health rather than providing health care

The Democracy Collaborative focuses on helping economically marginalised communities. They believe hospitals, as major local employers, should embrace an 'anchor institution mission', the idea being to lift up impoverished neighbourhoods through local job creation. They believe this encourages hospitals to re-embrace a community mission. We've written about them here and also republished the Foreword of the pictured report here.

Using social bonds to pay for community benefit

One of the key issues in ‘creating health’ is understanding how to value it in order to deduce how to invest in it. This remains an area of debate but we like this sketchy video by David Relph, at the time the Head of Strategy and Business Planning at University Hospitals Bristol, in which he describes using social impact bonds. We wrote about David's work in this post.

Turn patients into mentors to improve health care delivery

Social knowledge can be used to activate professional knowledge, making it more relevant to people. This is what Mothers2Mothers does, a project in which HIV-positive mothers support other mothers so that they can better navigate the health system in Kenya and the rest of Southern Africa, which is pretty difficult. We republished a book chapter that described the project here.

Using health care funding to build trust in a community

Alex Briscoe, the Director of Alameda County’s Health Care Services Agency, believes that one of the reasons why people from under-served communities do not access more health care is because they struggle to connect with today’s health care professionals. This makes Briscoe believe the delivery system has to change so that it creates trust. It has to be health care for people by people,” he says. See our interview of Alex here.

“What’s it like to live here?”

In southwest England, a community nurse decided to ask people this simple question, rather than keep telling them what they needed to do to improve their health. The answers surprised her and led to community-led initiatives that have now become the Connecting Communities (C2) programme innovative ways to improve their environment, its safety and their sense of self.

The collateral value of food sovereignty

Rather than buy food at gas stations or convenience stores with bulletproof windows, the people of Detroit are looking to make themselves a food sovereign city where residents grow the majority of fruits and vegetables consumed. But this is about more than the health value of fresh food. The programme, Keep Growing Detroit, wants to turn beginner gardeners into engaged community leaders enabling them to address the wider needs of the community.

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